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5 Stocks Pushing The Financial Sector Lower

Editor's Note: TheStreet ratings do not represent the views of TheStreet's staff or its contributors. Ratings are established by computer based on metrics for performance (which includes growth, stock performance, efficiency and valuation) and risk (volatility and solvency). Companies with poor cash flow or high debt levels tend to earn lower ratings in our model

Two out of the three major indices are trading lower today with the
Dow Jones Industrial Average (
^DJI) trading up 15 points (0.1%) at 12,980 as of Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012, 11:49 AM ET. The NYSE advances/declines ratio sits at 1,319 issues advancing vs. 1,553 declining with 162 unchanged.

TheStreet Ratings group would like to highlight 5 stocks pushing the sector lower today:

5.
Discover Financial Services (
DFS) is one of the companies pushing the Financial sector lower today. As of noon trading, Discover Financial Services is down $0.24 (-0.6%) to $40.99 on light volume Thus far, 851,569 shares of Discover Financial Services exchanged hands as compared to its average daily volume of 4.2 million shares. The stock has ranged in price between $40.91-$41.34 after having opened the day at $41.22 as compared to the previous trading day's close of $41.23.

Discover Financial Services, a bank holding company, offers direct banking and payment services in the United States. It operates in two segments, Direct Banking and Payment Services. Discover Financial Services has a market cap of $21.0 billion and is part of the financial services industry. The company has a P/E ratio of 9.6, below the S&P 500 P/E ratio of 17.7. Shares are up 73.4% year to date as of the close of trading on Monday. Currently there are 12 analysts that rate Discover Financial Services a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 5 rate it a hold.

TheStreet Ratings rates Discover Financial Services as a
buy. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its solid stock price performance, revenue growth, growth in earnings per share, expanding profit margins and good cash flow from operations. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had generally high debt management risk by most measures that we evaluated. Get the full
Discover Financial Services Ratings Report now.

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